Tag: ACT

  • All about Scotland’s newly passed Tertiary Education and Training Act

    All about Scotland’s newly passed Tertiary Education and Training Act

    For the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Act, the journey from review to consultation to bill to law has been a long one – but it’s finally complete.

    As the dust settles, we can heuristically chop its protracted passage up into three stages according to where the policy focus was.

    First came the Withers review and its push to reconfigure the funding body landscape to promote coherence, which resulted in the accumulation of new responsibilities for the Scottish Funding Council, and the corresponding diminution of Skills Development Scotland’s remit in a way that was at times quite fractious.

    If you’d responded to the 2024 consultation on funding body reform, you could be forgiven for assuming that this shake-up would have continued to be the central area of prominence as the legislation was introduced. It’s true that plenty of parliamentary time and written evidence was taken up with the mechanics and technicalities of moving staff and capabilities from one arm’s length body to another, but for much of last year the real action wasn’t around the SFC/SDS/SAAS moving parts – rather, it related to questions of sector financial oversight and how the legislation could better speak to these.

    Former higher education minister Graeme Dey kicked this phase off last January by musing that the bill could beef up the funding council’s “powers of intervention”. In light of the crisis at the University of Dundee, and emerging issues elsewhere, it became politically tricky to press forward with a bill that could be potentially criticised as rearranging deckchairs (there was no great cross-party love for it – it later squeezed through stage one with support from the Scottish Greens, who explicitly said they wanted it to progress so that they could append stuff to it later).

    So when the legislation was published, we got some additional but still fairly tenuous new powers for the SFC. These included greater scope to conduct the investigations known as “efficiency studies”, and the ability to issue written recommendations (possibly publicly, but I wouldn’t hold your breath) and guidance that governing bodies will need to “have regard” to. Plus there will be a responsibility on funded education bodies, including universities, to proactively notify the funding council in the event of “certain developments”. But exactly what these will be is left to secondary legislation – it’s likely to include job cuts and specific financial thresholds, but the process has been left convoluted and it’s clearly not a system that’s going to be springing into action any time soon.

    While the desire to use the bill to speak to the government’s job of monitoring the financial health of the system has not gone away, it’s also been clear since the autumn that ministers didn’t want to go too far either, shooting down amendments on issues like governance reform (as well as proposals on executive pay caps, student union funding, and mental health).

    Rather, the final run-up to the legislation’s passage at stage three was dominated by both opposition MSPs and the government adding other bits and pieces to the legislation in a series of compromises (we can but speculate on how the reshuffling off of Graeme Dey led to more compromising than might have been the case otherwise).

    As a result, the headline measures that the newly passed Act will bring about feel quite distinct from where we were at the start. Let’s take a look how it changed.

    A national strategy

    The bill’s long title was originally as follows:

    An Act of the Scottish Parliament to make provision about the functions and governance of the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council; to make provision about financial support for students in further and higher education; and for connected purposes.

    Following stage three, it’s now

    An Act of the Scottish Parliament to make provision about a national funding strategy for tertiary education, skills and apprenticeships; to make provision about the functions and governance of the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council; to make provision about financial support for students in further and higher education; and for connected purposes.

    You get the sense that the repeated questioning in Holyrood of the need for this legislation – at a time of serious challenges for Scotland’s universities, colleges and apprenticeship system – has played a role here. The Act is now squarely about funding, even if it has done so in a way that leaves the actual content until after the election.

    Scottish ministers will now be obliged to prepare a national funding strategy, specifying needs, priorities and outcomes for different aspects of the tertiary system. Consultation with learners, trade unions, employers and education bodies will be mandatory. Regular progress reports are stipulated. In the Scottish Parliament, higher education minister Ben Macpherson said that having a strategy will ensure that funding decisions are based on an “even more robust understanding” of skills needs.

    The language of “as soon as reasonably practicable” gives leeway for this to appear after the ongoing Future Framework for Universities project, and to be informed by its findings. Which is not to say that the Scottish higher education sector is necessarily thrilled about it – in the stage three debate, we heard that Universities Scotland has expressed concerns about autonomy. The minister was at pains to stress that for universities the strategy will not direct funding to specific provision.

    Fair work, GBV, and access

    Last week – a cynic might suggest there was a final push to get the legislation over the line – the Scottish government announced that the bill would enable action on both fair work requirements and prevention of gender-based violence on campus. Something similar happened ahead of the stage two vote, where provisions for data sharing in support of the access agenda were unexpectedly introduced, despite previous indications that the Scottish government was reluctant to take these forward in the current parliamentary session.

    The fair work announcement – an agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens – will see colleges and universities expected to adopt further Fair Work First criteria by April 2027, including no inappropriate use of zero hour contracts, flexible and family-friendly working practices, and action on workplace inequalities, all of which are currently only encouraged. The announcement to Parliament does note that where a case is made for more time is required for an institution to make the changes, this may well be accepted.

    Including a condition of funding around preventing gender-based violence was first proposed at stage two in a slightly different form, supported by campaign group EmilyTest. This didn’t pass, but new Scottish government amendment 29 will enable the SFC to impose a condition of funding on education bodies around the prevention of gender-based violence, both in terms of taking action to prevent gender-based violence against staff and students, and in reporting on action taken. Before issuing guidance, the funding council will be required to consult both campaign groups and education bodies.

    All these measures – promoting fair work, enabling data sharing, and preventing gender-based violence – got a shout-out in the minister’s closing speech as among the substantial benefits the bill will bring. All of them have quite a long way to go as well. On the free school meal data sharing question, it’s been widely suggested that the limited nudge the idea gets in the legislation is a long way from ironing out all the technical barriers.

    The SFC and its role

    During the legislation’s passage the government hinted it was open to renaming the Scottish Funding Council to reflect its expanded role. It hasn’t happened, but Ben Macpherson still told Holyrood he was open to the idea.

    Stage three did, however, see amendments to the bill which will see the Scottish Funding Council board expand, with a new maximum size of 16 members appointed by ministers, up from 14. The government also put forward, or accepted, some degree of stipulation on who those board members should be – under pressure from other MSPs – though it ended up couched in the language of “have regard to the desirability of” rather than a prescription. This will now include learner representatives, SFC employee representatives, and education sector staff representatives.

    We explored in our original write-up how the legislation seeks to give the funding council new powers, up to a point, to monitor and influence the education bodies it funds (and there’s a summary above). While during parliamentary passage many MSPs sought to push for further duties and means of intervention, the Scottish government largely saw these off, arguing for the importance of university autonomy and the purported risks around Office for National Statistics public sector classification.

    But there were a few small changes along the way, for example the insertion of powers for the SFC to secure the carrying out of an independent examination into the financial sustainability or financial governance of an education provider it funds, and the remit of funding council “efficiency studies” has been extended to consider the needs and interests of staff as well as students.

    An opposition amendment that will require the SFC to conduct an annual report on the financial sustainability of the further and higher education sector was accepted by the government – some would say the funding council already does this, but now it’s in the legislation. This was made more interesting by a rival opposition amendment which sought to make this an independent review of university financial health (it was suggested that Audit Scotland would take the lead). However, this was shot down.

    Apprenticeships and future battles

    For all that MSPs have used the bill’s passage as an opportunity to probe the Scottish government’s stewardship of the university sector – and it shouldn’t be underestimated how much the legislation’s eventual form has been shaped by reaction to funding crises and job losses – the issue that has been most prominent throughout Holyrood debate has been about shifts in apprenticeship responsibilities and the wider question of how much funding goes to this kind of post-16 provision.

    Amendments requiring the Scottish government to publish an account of how apprenticeship levy consequentials are being spent, or to introduce an apprenticeships guarantee, or ringfence funding, or to specify a commitment to foundation apprenticeships, were all voted down. But the question of Scotland’s level of apprenticeship starts – and how the government deploys levy money, to the extent that it can be said to – has continued to grow in importance as perhaps the pre-eminent attack line on the SNP from opposition parties in post-compulsory education policy.

    There’s an important takeaway for the sector here, in how much political pressure is being brought to bear on boosting apprenticeship numbers, rather than university degree places. It’s already an argument the sector is trying to get ahead of – an article from Universities Scotland today makes the case that universities want to do more in the graduate apprentice space, and are being held back by a lack of flexibility.

    The tertiary bill, in the form it eventually ended up in, puts new duties on universities, as well as taking some tentative steps which – if followed through in implementation – could contribute to them being better places to work and study in. It also heaps more responsibility for overseeing the disparate parts of the system on the funding council, while introducing reforms to its corporate structure which will inevitably take time to process.

    It even, via the last minute changes, commits the next Scottish government to spelling out its approach to funding. But it doesn’t speak to the quantum of that funding, and for universities it’s never been clearer that there exists both growing financial pressures elsewhere in the tertiary space, and growing political pressure to pay attention to areas outwith higher education, an issue that will grow in prominence in a likely more divided and certainly more unpredictable Holyrood after May’s elections.

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  • Why universities struggle to act on early warning data

    Why universities struggle to act on early warning data

    Dashboards light up with warning signals weeks into term, yet intervention often comes too late—if at all.

    Despite significant investment in learner analytics and regulatory pressure to meet an 80 per cent continuation threshold for full-time undergraduates, universities consistently struggle to act when their systems flag at-risk students.

    This implementation gap isn’t about technology or data quality. It’s an organisational challenge that exposes fundamental tensions between how universities are structured and what regulatory compliance now demands.

    The Office for Students has made its expectations clear: providers must demonstrate they are delivering positive outcomes, with thresholds of 80 per cent continuation and 75 per cent completion for full-time first degree students. Context can explain but not excuse performance below these levels. Universities are expected to identify struggling students early and intervene effectively.

    Yet most institutions remain organised around systems designed for retrospective quality assurance rather than proactive support, creating a gap between regulatory expectations and institutional capability.

    The organisational challenge of early intervention

    When analytics platforms flag students showing signs of disengagement—missed lectures, incomplete activities, limited platform interaction—institutions face an organisational challenge, not a technical one. The data arrives weeks into term, offering time for meaningful intervention. But this is precisely when universities struggle to act.

    The problem isn’t identifying risk. Modern analytics can detect concerning patterns within the first few weeks of term. The problem is organisational readiness: who has authority to act on probabilistic signals? What level of certainty justifies intervention? Which protocols govern the response? Most institutions lack clear answers, leaving staff paralysed between the imperative to support students and uncertainty about their authority to act.

    This paralysis has consequences. OfS data shows that 7.2 per cent of students are at providers where continuation rates fall below thresholds. While sector-level performance generally exceeds requirements, variation at provider and course level suggests some institutions manage early intervention better than others.

    Where regulatory pressure meets organisational resistance

    The clash between regulatory expectations and institutional reality runs deeper than resource constraints or technological limitations. Universities have developed (sometimes over centuries) around a model of academic authority that concentrates judgement at specific points: module boards, exam committees, graduation ceremonies. This architecture of late certainty served institutions well when their primary function was certifying achievement. But it’s poorly suited to an environment demanding early intervention and proactive support.

    Consider how quality assurance typically operates. Module evaluations happen after teaching concludes. External examiners review work after assessment. Progression boards meet after results are finalised. These retrospective processes align with traditional academic governance but clash with regulatory expectations for timely intervention. The Teaching Excellence Framework and B3 conditions assume institutions can support students before problems become irreversible, yet most university processes are designed to make judgements after outcomes are clear.

    The governance gap in managing uncertainty

    Early intervention operates in the realm of probability, not certainty. A student flagged by analytics might be struggling—or might be finding their feet. Acting means accepting false positives; not acting means accepting false negatives. Most institutions lack governance frameworks for managing this uncertainty.

    The regulatory environment compounds this challenge. When the OfS investigates providers with concerning outcomes, it examines what systems are in place for early identification and intervention. Universities must demonstrate they are using “all available data” to support students. But how can institutions evidence good faith efforts when their governance structures aren’t designed for decisions based on partial information?

    Some institutions have tried to force early intervention through existing structures—requiring personal tutors to act on analytics alerts or making engagement monitoring mandatory. But without addressing underlying governance issues, these initiatives often become compliance exercises rather than genuine support mechanisms. Staff comply with requirements to contact flagged students but lack clear protocols for escalation, resources for support, or authority for substantive intervention.

    Building institutional systems that bridge the gap

    Institutions successfully implementing early intervention share common organisational characteristics. They haven’t eliminated the tension between regulatory requirements and academic culture—they’ve built systems to manage it.

    Often they create explicit governance frameworks for uncertainty. Rather than pretending analytics provides certainty, they acknowledge probability and build appropriate decision-making structures. This might include intervention panels with delegated authority, clear escalation pathways, or risk-based protocols that match response to confidence levels. These frameworks document decision-making, providing audit trails that satisfy regulatory requirements while preserving professional judgement.

    They develop tiered response systems that distribute authority appropriately. Light-touch interventions (automated emails, text check-ins) require minimal authority. Structured support (study skills sessions, peer mentoring) operates through professional services. Academic interventions (module changes, assessment adjustments) involve academic staff. This graduated approach enables rapid response to early signals while reserving substantive decisions for appropriate authorities.

    And they invest in institutional infrastructure beyond technology. This includes training staff to interpret probabilistic data, developing shared vocabularies for discussing risk, and creating feedback loops to refine interventions. Successful institutions treat early intervention as an organisational capability requiring sustained development, not a technical project with an end date.

    The compliance imperative and cultural change

    As the OfS continues its assessment cycles, universities face increasing pressure to demonstrate effective early intervention. This regulatory scrutiny makes organisational readiness a compliance issue. Universities can no longer treat early intervention as optional innovation—it’s becoming core to demonstrating adequate quality assurance. Yet compliance-driven implementation rarely succeeds without cultural change. Institutions that view early intervention solely through a regulatory lens often create bureaucratic processes that satisfy auditors but don’t support students.

    More successful institutions frame early intervention as aligning with academic values: supporting student learning, enabling achievement, and promoting fairness. They engage academic staff not as compliance officers but as educators with enhanced tools for understanding student progress. This cultural work takes time but proves essential for moving beyond surface compliance to genuine organisational change.

    Implications for the sector

    The OfS shows no signs of relaxing numerical thresholds—if anything, regulatory expectations continue to strengthen. Financial pressures make student retention more critical. Public scrutiny of value for money increases pressure for demonstrable support. Universities must develop organisational capabilities for early intervention not as a temporary response to regulatory pressure but as a permanent feature of higher education.

    This requires more than purchasing analytics platforms or appointing retention officers. It demands fundamental questions about institutional organisation: How can governance frameworks accommodate uncertainty while maintaining rigour? How can universities distribute authority for intervention while preserving academic standards? How can institutions build cultures that value prevention as much as certification?

    The gap between early warning signals and institutional action is an organisational challenge requiring structural and cultural change. Universities investing only in analytics without addressing organisational readiness will continue to struggle, regardless of how sophisticated their systems become. These aren’t simple changes, but they’re necessary for institutions serious about supporting student success rather than merely measuring it.

    The question facing universities isn’t whether to act on early warning signals—regulatory pressure makes this increasingly mandatory. The question is whether institutions can develop the organisational capabilities to act effectively, bridging the gap between data and decision, between warning and intervention, between regulatory compliance and educational values.

    Those that cannot may find themselves not just failing their students but failing to meet the minimum expectations of a regulated sector.

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  • The Renters’ Rights Act is a disaster for independent students

    The Renters’ Rights Act is a disaster for independent students

    The Renters’ Rights Act is a transformative piece of legislation set to benefit renters through greater security and lower costs, except for one major blind spot.

    In particular, it may act as a homelessness pipeline for independent students – the status given by Student Finance England to students without external familial support while at university.

    Particularly vulnerable are those who are estranged, without living parents, or are care-leavers.

    The summer gap

    One of the key measures in the Renters’ Rights Act is the replacement of fixed-term tenancies with periodic tenancies, i.e., tenancies will be rolling, not fixed-term.

    This benefits most students, as it means that contracts can be terminated by tenants in May or June when the academic year is over, instead of being trapped in a twelve-month fixed-term contract.

    This creates the first major problem for independent students.

    Independent students rarely live exclusively with others who require year-round accommodation, and for many doing so may not be an option. So, instead of the security of a year-long contract guaranteeing accommodation, the landscape may shift so that most shared student rentals are only available between September and June.

    If independent students do manage to seek one another out and live together, this may seem to be one fix to this issue; it isn’t.

    Another key measure in the Renters’ Rights Act is to end no-fault evictions. However, there is a carve-out for student landlords to be able to evict students on a no-fault basis between June and September, provided they live in a student-only HMO. This is a major issue for students who do not have a home to return to.

    Then, there is the option for independent students to live in university halls. Unfortunately, this isn’t a secure option in many universities either. The Renters’ Rights Act allows purpose-built student accommodation to maintain fixed-term contracts. They are often only available from September to June, with providers utilising their accommodation over summer months for other uses.

    Where twelve-month tenancies are available, many purpose-built student accommodation blocks are significantly more expensive than student house shares.

    An independence tax

    Every option available to independent students is likely to add substantial costs. It seems improbable that student landlords will simply swallow the cost of having two or three fewer months of rental income over the academic year. So, there is a strong incentive for student landlords to up the cost of renting for the September to June period to a similar level to what it currently costs for twelve-month contracts.

    While the Renters’ Rights Act allows tenants to challenge unfair rises in rent, this isn’t a particularly effective measure for student housing; students are an incredibly transient group of tenants who can’t challenge an increase prior to being a tenant.

    All that is before considering the loss of the only cost-free workaround for students without a guarantor – upfront rental payments. Often, independent students have avoided the need for a UK-based guarantor by paying several months of rent in advance.

    However, the Renters’ Rights Act is set to curtail this practice by capping the amount of rent a landlord can request upfront. Without the option to pay upfront, these students will be forced toward private guarantor schemes, which are commercial services that typically charge a non-refundable fee in the region of 10 per cent of annual rent.

    Time for an extended maintenance loan

    Without substantially changing the Renters’ Rights Act to the detriment of most students, there seems to be no easy fix available beyond providing additional financial support for independent students.

    Last year, I called for the government to implement an extended maintenance loan aligned with the uplift available for other students who need year-long maintenance support – those on a “long course” – the name for those on a course which runs longer than thirty weeks and three days.

    When I wrote for Wonkhe to launch the campaign for an extended maintenance loan, I predicted that the government would make good on their promise of grants primarily to benefit the Department for Education’s public relations department. This prediction has come true – the government reintroduced grants for the poorest students, on specific courses.

    Unfortunately, this isn’t the progressive silver bullet it sounds like. It means that those students on those courses eligible for grants will repay less in the future. This benefit only materialises if, at some point in the future, their income is of an adequate level to be able to repay their loan in full – which is predicted to be about half of borrowers by the government.

    It’s a nice middle-earner’s income bonus in middle-age for a small number of students. While a step in the right direction and not to be scorned, it’s not the radical progressive reform it’s touted as. It changes nothing for the students struggling to cover basic living costs and, for example, being forced to live at home during their degree, which is around one-third of undergraduates according to UCAS, the highest level ever recorded – and not an option for independent students.

    There were some incremental improvements for care-leavers last year, who are no longer to be means assessed if entering higher education after the age of twenty-five. Indeed, the government is making progress on strengthening support for care-leavers.

    Ensuring more robust implementation of care-leaver “Pathway Plans” – a statutory duty which means local authorities must support care-leavers up to the age of twenty-five – would go a long way to helping this specific group with additional costs due to the aforementioned issues, too.

    A new barrier to be broken

    So, the Renters’ Rights Act, which I should be clear that I largely support and will myself benefit from, has a blind spot. It’s one I’ve raised, and multiple supportive MPs have raised, too.Independent students, particularly care-leavers, estranged students, and students with no living parents, already have a much higher attrition rate and a large attainment gap.

    This blind spot may lead to homelessness and act as a further deterrent for this group to access higher education and reach their full potential.You could say it is a barrier to opportunity, hoisted up by a government committed to breaking all the other barriers down.

    If the government is serious about its “Barriers to Opportunity” mission, it cannot allow a housing reform to become a homelessness pipeline for the very students who have already overcome the most to get to university.

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  • Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

    Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

    A recent op-ed by David Randall, executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, argues that faculty hiring in American universities has become so corrupt that it requires sweeping legislative intervention. NAS’s proposed Faculty Merit Act would require public universities to publish every higher ed standardized test score—SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT and more—of every faculty member and every applicant for that faculty member’s position across different stages of a faculty search. The goal, they claim, is to expose discrimination and restore meritocracy.

    Letter to the editor

    A letter has been submitted in response to this article. You can read the letter here, and view all of our letters to the editor here.

    The proposal’s logic is explicit: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If average scores decline from round to round, or if the eventual hire scored lower than dozens—or even hundreds—of rejected applicants, the public, Randall argues, should be able to “see that something is wrong.”

    But the Faculty Merit Act rests on a serious misunderstanding of how measurement and selection actually work. Even if one accepts Randall’s premise that a standardized test score “isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit,” the conclusions he draws simply do not follow. The supposed red flags the proposed act promises to reveal are not evidence of corruption. They are the expected mathematical consequences of using an imperfect measure in a large applicant pool.

    I am a data scientist who works on issues of social justice. What concerns me is not only that NAS’s proposal is statistically unsound, but that it would mislead the public while presenting itself as transparent.

    A Statistical Mistake

    The proposed act depends on a simple idea: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If the person hired has a lower score than many rejected applicants, or if average scores decline from round to round, something must be amiss.

    This sounds intuitive. It is also wrong.

    To see why, imagine the following setup. Every applicant has some level of “true merit” for a faculty job—originality, research judgment, teaching ability, intellectual fit. We cannot observe this truth directly. Instead, we observe a standardized test score, which captures some aspects of ability but misses many others. In other words, the test score contains two parts: a signal (the part related to actual merit) and noise (everything else the test does not measure).

    Now suppose a search attracts 300 applicants, as in Randall’s own example. Assume—very generously—that the search committee somehow identifies the single best applicant by true merit and hires that person.

    Here is the crucial point: Even if test scores are meaningfully related to true merit, the best applicant will almost never have the highest test score.

    Why? Because when many people are competing, even moderate noise overwhelms rank ordering. A noisy measure will always misrank some individuals, and the larger the pool, the more dramatic those misrankings become. This is the same reason that ranking professional athletes by a single skill—free-throw percentage, say—would routinely misidentify the best overall players, especially in a large league.

    How Strong Is the Test-Merit Relationship, Really?

    Before putting numbers on this, we should ask a basic empirical question: How strongly do standardized tests actually predict the kinds of outcomes that matter in academia?

    The most comprehensive recent research on the GRE—the test most relevant to graduate education—finds minimal predictive value. A meta-analysis of more than 200 studies found that GRE scores explain just over 3 percent of the variation in graduate outcomes such as GPA, degree completion and licensing exam performance. For graduate GPA specifically—the outcome the test is explicitly designed to predict—GRE scores explained only about 4 percent of the variance.

    These studies assess near-term prediction within the same educational context: GRE scores predicting outcomes for the very students who took the test, measured only a few years later—under conditions maximally favorable to the test’s validity. The NAS proposal extrapolates from evidence that is already weak even under these favorable conditions. It would evaluate faculty hiring using test scores—often SAT scores—taken at age 17, applied to candidates who may now be in their 30s, 40s or older. Direct evidence for that kind of long-term extrapolation is scarce. However, the limited evidence that does exist points towards weak relationships rather than strong ones. For instance, Google’s internal hiring studies famously found “very little correlation” between SAT scores and job performance.

    Taken together, the research suggests that any realistic relationship between standardized test scores and faculty merit is weak—certainly well below the levels needed to support NAS’s proposed diagnostics.

    What This Means in Practice

    The proposed Faculty Merit Act raises an important practical question: Even if standardized test scores contain some information about merit, how useful are they when hundreds of applicants compete for a single job?

    Taking the GRE meta-analysis at face value, standardized test scores correlate with relevant academic outcomes at only about 0.18. Treating that number as a proxy for faculty merit is already generous, given the decades that often separate testing from hiring and the profound differences between standardized exams and the actual work of a professor. But let us grant it anyway.

    Now, consider a search with 300 applicants. With a correlation of 0.18, I calculate that the single strongest candidate by true merit would typically score only around the 70th percentile on the test—roughly 90th out of 300. In other words, it would be entirely normal for around 90 rejected applicants to have higher test scores than the eventual hire.

    Nothing improper has happened. No favoritism or manipulation is required. This outcome follows automatically from combining a weak proxy with a large applicant pool.

    Even if we assume a much stronger relationship—say, a correlation of 0.30, which already exceeds what the evidence supports for most academic outcomes—the basic conclusion does not change. Under that assumption, I calculate that the best candidate would typically score only around the 80th percentile, corresponding to a rank near 60 out of 300. Dozens of rejected applicants would still have higher test scores than the person who gets the job.

    This is the point the proposal gets exactly backward. The pattern it treats as a red flag—a hire whose test score is lower than that of many rejected applicants—is not evidence of corruption. It is the normal, mathematically expected outcome whenever selection relies on an imperfect measure. Scaling this diagnostic across many searches does not make it informative; it simply reproduces the same expected misrankings at a larger scale.

    Why ‘Scores Dropped Each Round’ Proves Nothing

    The same logic applies to the claim that average test scores should increase at each stage of a search.

    Faculty hiring is not one-dimensional. Early stages might screen for general competence; later stages may emphasize originality, research direction, teaching effectiveness and departmental fit—traits that standardized tests measure poorly or not at all. As a search progresses, committees naturally place less weight on test scores and more weight on other information. When that happens, average test scores among finalists can stay flat or even decline. That pattern does not signal manipulation. It signals that the committee is selecting on dimensions that actually matter for the job.

    Transparency, Justice and Bad Diagnostics

    Randall’s op-ed, published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, frames the proposal as a response to injustice. But transparency based on invalid diagnostics does not mitigate injustice; it produces it.

    Publishing standardized test scores invites the public to draw conclusions that those numbers cannot support—and those conclusions will not fall evenly. Standardized test scores are strongly shaped by socioeconomic background and access to resources. Treating them as a universal yardstick of merit—especially for faculty careers—will predictably disadvantage scholars from marginalized and nontraditional paths.

    From the standpoint of justice, this is deeply concerning. Accountability mechanisms must rest on sound reasoning. Otherwise, they become tools for enforcing hierarchy rather than fairness.

    If the goal is genuine academic renewal, it should begin with renewing our understanding of what numbers can—and cannot—tell us. Merit cannot be mandated by publishing the wrong metrics, and justice is not served by statistical arguments that collapse under careful inspection.

    Chad M. Topaz is a faculty member at Williams College; co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity; and winner of the Mary and Alfie Gray Award for Social Justice from the Association for Women in Mathematics. He is the author of Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in May, and can be found on Bluesky at @chadtopaz.

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  • What the Employment Rights Act 2025 means for higher education

    What the Employment Rights Act 2025 means for higher education

    After months of parliamentary back-and-forth, the Bill finally made it onto the statute books just before Christmas. For universities, the implications are wide-ranging, and the clock is ticking on compliance.

    The Act is the centrepiece of the government’s “Plan to Make Work Pay”, promising a shake-up of employment rights, union access, and labour market enforcement. For the sector, where workforce structures and contractual arrangements are particularly complex, these reforms need to be considered carefully. In this article, we have focused on a rundown of five things universities need to know now.

    Unfair dismissal: the bar just got lower and compensation higher. From 2027, staff will only need six months’ service (down from two years) to claim unfair dismissal and the maximum cap on compensation is going. That means universities could face much bigger payouts if things go wrong. Universities should review probation policies, equip managers to proactively manage performance during probation and avoid extended probation periods, where possible, to reduce the legal risk.

    Zero-hours and casual contracts: new rules, new risk. Think visiting lecturers, exam invigilators, and a lot of student-facing roles. The Act introduces rights to request guaranteed hours, proper notice of shifts, and compensation for cancellations. If you rely heavily on a casual workforce, generally or in certain areas, now’s the time to audit those contracts and review use, although these measures won’t be brought into effect until 2027.

    Trade union access: expect more structured dialogue. With effect from 18 February 2026, the Act lowers the threshold for a valid industrial action ballot and shortens the notice period unions must give before taking action (14 to 10 days). It also extends the mandate for action from 6 to 12 months. This means it will be easier and quicker for unions to secure a mandate for strikes or other industrial action. Universities should expect a more agile approach from unions and be ready to respond to potential disruption with robust contingency planning and clear communication. It may be prudent to review recognition agreements, including the dispute resolution procedures, to seek to mitigate any negative impact.

    Sexual harassment: from October 2026, the Act will require universities to take “all” reasonable steps, not just “reasonable steps”, to prevent sexual harassment of staff, with regulations to follow on what this means in practice. At the same time, employers will become liable for harassment of staff by third parties (such as students, visitors, or contractors) across all protected characteristics, unless they can show they took all reasonable steps to prevent it.

    Disclosures of sexual harassment will be explicitly protected under whistleblowing law, and most confidentiality clauses (NDAs) that seek to prevent staff from raising or disclosing allegations of discrimination or harassment will be void. For universities, these changes raise the bar for prevention, policy, and training and align closely with the Office for Students’ E6 condition of registration, which already requires robust systems to prevent and respond to harassment and sexual misconduct affecting students.

    “Fire and rehire”: also from October 2026, dismissing and re-engaging staff to force through changes to pay, hours, leave, or benefits will be automatically unfair unless the university can prove it’s facing severe financial trouble. If you’re planning a restructure or harmonising terms from October onwards, you’ll also need to follow the revised statutory Code of Practice and have your business case watertight.

    If I were you

    Universities are already navigating a maze of employment models, from permanent academics, fixed-term researchers to casual student workers. These reforms demand a proactive approach to ensure legal compliance but also to maintain staff morale and institutional reputation.

    If you are a university leader, now is a good time to make it part of your new year’s resolution to audit your casual contracts – zero-hours, fixed-term, and casual roles all need additional scrutiny to ensure they meet new legal minimums. It would also be a good time to review probation and dismissal policies and manager compliance, as the shorter qualifying period and uncapped compensation change the risk calculus.

    Most institutions are in communication with their local unions, but now would be a good time to talk to your unions specifically about the changes, as early engagement can help manage expectations and smooth the path to compliance.

    While many in England may have recently reviewed institutional harassment policies as part of recent regulatory changes from the Office for Students, it is important to review sexual harassment policies and ensure managers know what is changing, how they can ensure compliance and to keep an eye out for new regulations.

    As much of the sector faces significant financial challenges, additional restructuring plans may be in play for the upcoming academic year. If this is the case, it is essential you review your plans in light of additional legislation around contract changes, particularly around “fire and rehire”. This is already somewhat of a legal minefield, but the constraints on employers will be far more stringent from October onwards.

    And, if nothing else, you and your colleagues must keep good records. Documentation is your best defence if challenged.

    Ultimately, the Employment Rights Act 2025 isn’t just another HR update and universities must not treat it as one. Instead, it marks a cultural shift towards greater job security and worker voice. For universities, the challenge is to balance compliance with the need for flexibility to meet the complex needs of an institution in an evolving sector. Get ahead of the curve, and you can turn these changes into an opportunity to strengthen staff engagement and institutional resilience.

    Key dates for your diary

    18 February 2026

    • Simplifying industrial action notices and ballot papers
    • Increasing mandate period and reducing required notice period for industrial acton
    • Protections against dismissal and detriment for taking industrial action

    6 April 2026

    • Whistleblowing protection for sexual harassment disclosures
    • Collective redundancy protective award increase from 90 days gross pay to 180 days
    • (Expected) Repeal of the 50% threshold for industrial action ballots to revert to simple majority voting

    1 October 2026

    • “All reasonable steps” to prevent sexual harassment and prevent third party harassment
    • Trade union statutory access rights

    1 January 2027

    • Six month qualifying period for unfair dismissal and removal of compensation cap

    During 2027 (exact date to be determined)

    • Zero-hours and casual contract protections (guaranteed hours, notice, compensation)

    Some provisions are subject to further regulations or transitional arrangements. Check the latest government guidance for updates.

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  • Modernizing the special education workforce is a national imperative

    Modernizing the special education workforce is a national imperative

    Key points:

    America’s special education system is facing a slow-motion collapse. Nearly 8 million students now receive services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), but the number of qualified teachers and related service providers continues to shrink. Districts from California to Maine report the same story: unfilled positions, overworked staff, and students missing the services they’re legally entitled to receive.

    “The promise of IDEA means little if there’s no one left to deliver it.”

    The data tell a clear story. Since 2013, the number of children ages 3–21 served under IDEA has grown from 6.4 million to roughly 7.5 million. Yet the teacher pipeline has moved in the opposite direction. According to Title II reports, teacher-preparation enrollments dropped 6 percent over the last decade and program completions plunged 27 percent. At the same time, nearly half of special educators leave the field within their first five years.

    By 2023, 45 percent of public schools were operating without a full teaching staff. Vacancies were most acute in special education. Attrition, burnout, and early retirements outpace new entrants by a wide margin.

    Why the traditional model no longer works

    For decades, schools and staffing firms have fought over the same dwindling pool of licensed providers. Recruiting cycles stretch for months, while students wait for evaluations, therapies, or IEP services.

    Traditional staffing firms focus on long-term contracts lasting six months or more, which makes sense for stability, but ignores an enormous, untapped workforce: thousands of credentialed professionals who could contribute a few extra hours each week if the system made it easy.

    Meanwhile, the process of credentialing, vetting, and matching candidates remains slow and manual, reliant on spreadsheets, email, and recruiters juggling dozens of openings. The result is predictable: delayed assessments, compliance risk, and burned-out staff covering for unfilled roles.

    “Districts and recruiters compete for the same people, when they could be expanding the pool instead.”

    The hidden workforce hiding in plain sight

    Across the country, tens of thousands of licensed professionals–speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, school psychologists, special educators–are under-employed. Many have stepped back from full-time work to care for families or pursue private practice. Others left the classroom but still want to contribute.

    Imagine if districts could tap those “extra hours” through a vetted, AI-powered marketplace. A system that matched real-time school requests with qualified providers in their state. A model like this wouldn’t replace full-time roles; it would expand capacity, reduce burnout, and bring talent back into the system.

    This isn’t theoretical. The same “on-demand” concept has already modernized industries from medicine to media. Education is long overdue for the same reinvention.

    What modernization looks like

    1. AI-driven matching: Districts post specific service needs (evaluations, IEP meetings, therapy hours). Licensed providers choose opportunities that fit their schedule.
    2. Verified credentials and provider profiles: Platforms integrate state licensure databases and background checks to ensure compliance and provide profiles with all candidate information including on-demand, video interviews so schools can make informed hiring decisions immediately.
    3. Smart staffing metrics: Schools track fill-rates, provider utilization, and service delays in real time.
    4. Integrated workflows: The system plugs into existing special education management tools. No new learning curve for administrators.

    A moment of urgency

    The shortage isn’t just inconvenient; it’s systemic. Each unfilled position represents students who lose therapy hours, districts risking due-process complaints, and educators pushed closer to burnout.

    With IDEA students now representing nearly 15 percent of all public school enrollment, the nation can’t afford to let a twentieth-century staffing model dictate twenty-first-century outcomes.

    We have the technology. We have the workforce. What we need is the will to connect them.

    “Modernizing special education staffing isn’t innovation for innovation’s sake, it’s survival.”

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  • The NO FAKES Act is a real threat to free expression

    The NO FAKES Act is a real threat to free expression

    Imagine a fourth-grade classroom in which the teacher uses AI to generate a video of Ronald Reagan explaining his Cold War strategy. It’s history in living color, and the students lean in, captivated. Now imagine that same teacher facing thousands of dollars in damages under the proposed NO FAKES Act because the video looks too real.

    That’s not sci-fi. It’s a risk baked into this bill. The NO FAKES Act, introduced this year in both the House and Senate, would create a new federal “digital replication right” letting people control the use of AI-generated versions of their voice or likeness. That means people can block others from sharing realistic, digitally created images of them. The right can extend for up to 70 years after the person’s death and is transferred to heirs. It also lets people sue those who share unauthorized “digital replicas,” as well as the companies that make such works possible.

    A “digital replica” is defined as a newly created, highly realistic representation “readily identifiable” as a person’s voice or likeness. That includes fully virtual recreations and real images or recordings that are materially altered. 

    The bill bans unauthorized public use or distribution of “digital replicas.” But almost all of the covered “replicas” are fully protected by the First Amendment, meaning Congress cannot legislate their suppression.

    Can someone own a voice? Breaking down the right of publicity.

    What to do if a company makes a copy of your voice and profits from it without your permission.


    Read More

    The bill does list exceptions for “bona fide” news, documentaries, historical works, biographical works, commentary, scholarship, satire, or parody. But there’s a catch. News is exempt only if the replica is the subject of, or materially relevant to, the story. At best, this means any story relating to, say, political deepfakes must be reviewed by an attorney to decide if the story is “bona fide” news and the deepfake is sufficiently relevant to include in the story itself. At worst, this means politicians and other public figures will start suing journalists and others who talk about newsworthy replicas of them, if they don’t like what the person had to say. 

    Even worse, the documentary, historical, and biographical exceptions vanish if the work creates a false impression that it’s “an authentic [work] in which the person actually participated.” That swallows the exception and makes any realistic recreations, like the fourth-grade example above, legally radioactive.

    The reach goes well beyond classrooms, too. Academics using recreated voices for research, documentarians patching gaps in archival footage, artists experimenting with digital media, or writers reenacting leaked authentic conversations could all face litigation. The exceptions are so narrowly drawn that they offer no real protection. And the risk doesn’t end with creators. Merely sharing a disputed clip can also invite a lawsuit.

    That’s a digital heckler’s veto whereby one complaint can erase lawful speech.

    The law also targets AI technology itself. Section 2(c)(2)(B) imposes liability on anyone who distributes a tool “primarily designed” to make digital replicas. That vague standard can easily ensnare open-source developers and small startups whose generative AI models sometimes output a voice or face that resembles a real person. 

    Then there’s the “notice-and-takedown” regime, modeled after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The bill requires online platforms to promptly remove or disable access to any alleged unauthorized “digital replica” once they receive a complaint, or risk losing legal immunity and facing penalties. In other words, platforms that don’t yank flagged content fast enough can be on the hook, which means they’ll likely delete first and ask questions never. That’s a digital heckler’s veto whereby one complaint can erase lawful speech.

    On paper, the NO FAKES Act just looks like a safeguard against misleading and nonconsensual deepfakes. In practice, it would give politicians, celebrities, and other public figures new leverage over how they’re portrayed in today’s media, and grant their families enduring control over how they can be portrayed in history.

    And let’s not forget that existing law already applies to digital replicas. Most states already recognize a right of publicity to police commercial uses of a person’s name, image, or likeness. Traditionally, that protection has been limited to overtly commercial contexts, such as advertising or merchandising. The NO FAKES Act breaks that guardrail, turning a narrow protection into a broad property right that threatens the First Amendment.

    Creativity cannot thrive under constant permission. New mediums shouldn’t mean new muzzles. 

    AI-generated expression, like all expression, can also be punished when it crosses into unprotected categories such as fraud or defamation. Beyond those limits, government restrictions on creative tools risks strangling the diversity of ideas and free speech makes possible. 

    Creativity cannot thrive under a constant need for permission. New mediums shouldn’t mean new muzzles. 

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  • ACT and Texas Instruments Collaborate to Enhance Student Success in Mathematics

    ACT and Texas Instruments Collaborate to Enhance Student Success in Mathematics

    Iowa City, Iowa and Dallas, Texas (November 12, 2025) – ACT, a leader in college and career readiness assessment, and Texas Instruments Education Technology (TI), a division of the global semiconductor company, today announced a comprehensive partnership aimed at empowering students to achieve their best performance on the ACT mathematics test.

    This initiative brings together two education leaders to provide innovative resources and tools that maximize student potential. The partnership will start by providing:

    • A new dedicated online resource center featuring co-branded instructional videos demonstrating optimal use of TI calculators during the ACT mathematics test.
    • Additional study materials featuring TI calculators to help students build upon and apply their mathematical knowledge while maximizing their time on the ACT test.
    • Professional development programs for teachers focused on effective calculator-based testing strategies.

    “This partnership represents our commitment to providing students with the tools and resources they need to demonstrate their mathematical knowledge effectively,” said Andrew Taylor, Senior Vice President of Educational Solutions and International, ACT, “By working with Texas Instruments, we’re ensuring students have access to familiar, powerful technology tools during this important assessment.”

    “Texas Instruments is proud to partner with ACT to support student success,” said Laura Chambers, President at Texas Instruments Education Technology. “Our calculator technology, combined with targeted instructional resources, will help students showcase their true mathematical abilities during the ACT test.” 

    The new resources are available now to students and educators on the ACT website www.act.org under ACT Math Calculator Tips.

    About ACT

    ACT is transforming college and career readiness pathways so that everyone can discover and fulfill their potential. Grounded in more than 65 years of research, ACT’s learning resources, assessments, research, and work-ready credentials are trusted by students, job seekers, educators, schools, government agencies, and employers in the U.S. and around the world to help people achieve their education and career goals at every stage of life. Visit us at https://www.act.org/.  

    About Texas Instruments

    Texas Instruments Education Technology (TI) — the gold standard for excellence in math — provides exam-approved graphing calculators and interactive STEM technology. TI calculators and accessories drive student understanding and engagement without adding to online distractions. We are committed to empowering teachers, inspiring students and supporting real learning in classrooms everywhere. For more information, visit education.ti.com.

    Texas Instruments Incorporated (Nasdaq: TXN) is a global semiconductor company that designs, manufactures and sells analog and embedded processing chips for markets such as industrial, automotive, personal electronics, enterprise systems and communications equipment. At our core, we have a passion to create a better world by making electronics more affordable through semiconductors. This passion is alive today as each generation of innovation builds upon the last to make our technology more reliable, more affordable and lower power, making it possible for semiconductors to go into electronics everywhere. Learn more at TI.com.

    eSchool News Staff
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  • The Higher Ed Act Turns 60—And Needs a Refresh (opinion)

    The Higher Ed Act Turns 60—And Needs a Refresh (opinion)

    Sixty years ago, when Congress passed the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, it made a bipartisan promise to the American people: that college opportunity should not be reserved for the wealthy, but made available to anyone willing to work for it. That commitment built the foundation for millions of students to pursue higher education, strengthen the workforce, improve their lives and advance our nation.

    But as we mark another anniversary of the HEA’s enactment, that promise feels increasingly distant. The law that should lay out a steadfast vision for higher education has been left to languish for nearly two decades without a comprehensive review or update. In the interim, the foundational need-based aid programs it created—like the Pell Grant and Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant programs—are now at the mercy of annual budget battles and political brinkmanship. When thoughtful reform is pushed to the back burner, the result is a student aid system that is fragmented and reactive, rather than strategic and steady. Rather than providing reliable support for students, it introduces instability and mistrust.

    The federal appropriations process, once a vehicle for steady investment in the nation’s priorities, has been weaponized—and students are collateral damage. The current government shutdown, now more than a month and counting, is only the latest reminder of how Congress is failing on its budgetary responsibilities. Congress consistently misses its own deadlines, instead relying on continuing resolutions, short-term fixes and partisan negotiations that leave students, families and the colleges that serve them in a constant state of uncertainty.

    When final budget information is not available until months after the fiscal year begins, students and families suffer. When schools cannot provide reliable estimates of federal, state or institutional aid awards, students are left in limbo and families lose faith that higher education remains a viable pathway to opportunity. That’s not a sustainable or fair system—it’s a symptom of one that’s been overrun by partisanship.

    Instead of prioritizing steady, predictable funding for student aid programs, lawmakers increasingly use appropriations as leverage to extract concessions on policy priorities better addressed outside of the appropriations process, ultimately leading to the threat of a government shutdown for which millions of Americans pay the price.

    But when updating landmark pieces of legislation falls off the list of priorities, it leaves few vehicles for thorough policy reform. FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) simplification—the largest overhaul of the financial aid system in decades—was tacked onto an appropriations bill in the final days of the first Trump administration.

    And it’s not just appropriations. Over the past two decades, Congress has used the budget reconciliation process—a tool designed for swift deficit reduction—to make sweeping changes to federal student aid. From the creation of Public Service Loan Forgiveness in 2007 to the elimination of bank-based lending in the student loan program in 2010 to the recent overhaul of repayment plans and new loan limits in 2025, these changes have reshaped the financial aid landscape one policy at a time. This disjointed approach to policy change without comprehensive and considered debate results in confusion, unrealistic implementation timelines, conflicting statutes and unintended consequences, leaving the professionals who must translate policy into practice to manage monumental changes with little warning—and often little or unclear guidance.

    Without question, there are real challenges in higher education that demand congressional action. College prices continue to rise, student loan debt remains a national concern and families are rightly asking whether higher education is still worth the investment. But the place to grapple with those long-term structural, accountability and sustainability issues is through a full reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, not a patchwork of policies layered on top of one another through reconciliation bills, regulatory processes and executive orders.

    The HEA was designed to be reviewed and reauthorized every five years to ensure that student aid programs evolve alongside students’ needs, but the last comprehensive reauthorization took place in 2008. Since then, higher education has changed dramatically, but the law underpinning our financial aid system has not.

    What’s been lost in all this is the chance to step back and evaluate the student aid system as a whole, receive thoughtful input from experts and stakeholders, and pursue a comprehensive, bipartisan approach to address the root issues: how to make college more affordable, adapt to new learning models, streamline student aid delivery and ensure that public dollars are truly serving students’ needs.

    The Higher Education Act was born out of a shared belief that education is a public good—a cornerstone of economic mobility and national strength. As we reflect on the last six decades of progress, it’s clear that the country still believes in the promise of higher education, but trust in the system to deliver on that promise is eroding. What’s missing is the political will to rise above the polarization that threatens to pull us apart and to protect that promise. Congress must return to the thoughtful policymaking that once defined our approach to higher education and reauthorize the law that made opportunity possible for generations of Americans.

    Melanie Storey is president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA).

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  • WEEKEND READING: The Renters’ Rights Act: How will students’ tenancies change and when?

    WEEKEND READING: The Renters’ Rights Act: How will students’ tenancies change and when?

    This blog was kindly authored by Martin Blakey, the former Chief Executive of the student housing charity Unipol and a member of the British Property Federation’s Student Accommodation Committee.

    On Wednesday, 22 October 2025, the Renters’ Rights Bill passed through its final stage in a thinly occupied Commons chamber, and obtained Royal Assent on 28 October. HEPI has taken a close interest in how the Act’s changes would affect students, and a number of previous blogs that have charted the Bill’s progress are listed at the end of this one.

    The Bill has a long history, first appearing under the previous Conservative government under the title the Renters’ Reform Bill in May 2023 and then being resubmitted, after some redrafting, by the new Labour Government only 10 weeks into power in September 2024. Even under a Labour Government with a large majority, it has taken 13 months to progress the Bill through all of its stages, and that parliamentary process has had to deal with over 450 amendments in the last year.

    This is a substantial Act, and its various provisions will be phased in over a period of time. The Act contains many enabling powers, allowing Ministers to implement more detailed proposals on aspects of policy as further consultations take place. The right to redress (the ombudsman proposals), the landlord database and the Decent Homes Standard are, or will be, consulted on and detailed regulation will appear over the next year.

    Even in the final stages of the Bill, the Government did not give any timetable for implementation. Still, it is reasonable to conclude that tenure reform, which is not subject to much secondary regulation, will be implemented first. All the Government now has to decide is how long it should allow to raise the awareness of landlords and tenants about these significant impending changes, and how long it should give to those running private sector housing to make the necessary legal adjustments for existing and future tenancies.

    Because the mechanics of the Act are now known, it is possible, for the first time, to say what will happen to student tenants and make a reasonable and educated guess at the timescale involved.

    Timescale

    It is now clear that today’s student tenants (studying across 2025/26) and new tenants signing up for the 2026/27 academic year will see their tenure status change.

    As Matthew Pennycook said on 8 September 2025:

    …we will introduce the new tenancy for the private rented sector system in one stage. On this date the new tenancy system will apply to all private tenancies – existing tenancies will convert to the new system, and any new tenancies signed on or after this date will also be governed by the new rules. Existing fixed terms will be converted to periodic tenancies…

    So, all tenancies will change on a given date and the familiar fixed-term assured tenancy (AST) which has been used by virtually all students renting from the private sector will be replaced by the new assured tenancy. The fixed term within those ASTs will cease to exist, and rent payment periods in excess of four weeks’ rent will be unenforceable.

    Depending on who you listen to, this change is likely to come into effect between April and June 2026 and so it will affect today’s student tenants.

    There are a lot of questions about how these changes will come about, and it is now possible to provide a roadmap of how this will all work.

    There are no ‘interim’ stages. So landlords signing students up in the past and now, and up to the implementation date of tenure change under the Act, will continue to use fixed-term ASTs because that is the current system.

    Landlords and tenants on current contracts or signing up for the future would best see their agreement as entering into a general contract for a residential tenancy. That tenancy will have its precise status determined, in respect of these changes, at the point when a tenant actually takes possession and can move in (which is when the tenancy is actually granted).

    So, let’s go through a variety of scenarios and see what is going to happen.

    Students currently living in off-street shared houses – a house multiple occupancy (HMO)

    These students will currently be on a joint or individual AST, almost always, with a fixed period stipulated in that agreement. On the date of the Act’s tenure implementation this will become an assured tenancy, and that means that the fixed-term nature of the agreement falls away.

    The Government accepted that, in order to maintain the lettings cycle of student shared houses in line with the academic year, landlords would be able to seek repossession of their property by using a new ground for possession 4a. This allows landlords to give tenants notice of their intention to seek repossession on a given date between June and September.

    Following implementation, landlords will have to notify tenants within the first 30 days of their intention to use ground 4a. After this transitional provision, landlords will have to notify tenants of their intention to use ground 4a at the time of signing the contract.

    Under ground 4a landlords can give tenants 4 months’ notice to leave and can enforce that through the courts.

    Some legal experts have pointed out that if implementation is between April and June, then, as many fixed-terms expire in June or July, there would not be sufficient time under ground 4a to give 4 months’ notice. So, in theory, tenants could simply choose to stay in the property and give 2 months’ notice whenever they wanted to move out. This is the case, and for the first few months of operation, landlords may find that they cannot take advantage of ground 4a –  leaving them exposed if they have let the property to a new set of tenants without having a property with vacant possession to let. Whether a court would hold a landlord responsible for any financial claim or compensation sought by incoming tenants who would have to find alternative accommodation is unlikely, particularly if the landlord had tried to mitigate any loss by, say, finding and offering alternative accommodation.

    But landlords have other things they can do to bring their tenancies to an end over the implementation period. Until the date when ASTs become assured tenancies, the landlord can still give notice using the current ‘no fault’ eviction procedure under Section 21 (S21), giving a minimum two-month notice period. A S21 notice can be given at any time after the first 4 months of the AST, so most landlords will issue a S21 notice to their resident students while the tenancy is still an AST, giving them, in most cases, a right of repossession at the end of their AST fixed term. The Renters’ Rights Act does not revoke a valid S21 notice. Only after tenure change has been implemented is it no longer possible to issue a valid S21 notice.

    So long as the landlord gives notice under S21 on an existing AST before the introduction of assured tenancies, they will be able (as they are at present) to assume that tenants leave and new tenants will arrive as normal.

    It is just worth noting that serving a notice of intention to seek repossession does not mean a tenant can be removed from the property, and only a Court can evict a tenant. This is the case now, but generally, very few students fail to leave at the end of their tenancy, so it is important not to predict problems where these have not occurred in the past.

    Students currently living in smaller off-street houses

    This is the same as stipulated above for a shared house in respect of serving a valid S21 notice, but here, once the Act has been implemented, ground 4a cannot be used because its use is restricted to only off-street HMOs. So once tenure reform has taken place and the time period for issuing S21 notices has expired, tenants in this kind of property can remain as long as they wish until they give 2 months’ notice to leave. Landlords letting these smaller houses and flats may well find that they are housing non-students.

    Several attempts were made during the discussion of the Bill to extend ground 4a to all properties occupied by students, but the Government firmly rejected that approach.

    Baroness Taylor of Stevenage made the Government’s position clear on 15 October 2025:

    The Government recognise that the new tenancy system will have an impact on the way the student market operates. While we believe the ground covers the majority of the market, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that covers all circumstances. We think it is reasonable that the ground will apply to full-time students in larger house-share situations. Removing this restriction could lead to students who need more security of tenure – such as single parents living with their children or postgraduate couples living together who have put down roots in the area – being evicted more regularly.

    So the Government expects that some property previously occupied by students is likely to remain occupied, and this stock will therefore leave the student market and enter the general rental market.

    Students living in off-street housing after implementation

    These students will have assured tenancy status and will fall fully under the provisions of the new Act. With the exception of ground 4a in shared student houses, they will be able to stay as long as they wish in the property until they give notice and will be able to give 2 months’ notice, at any stage of the year, to leave the property.

    Currently, they will be signed up using ASTs but after implementation, most of those tenure conditions will be replaced by the provisions of the new Act.

    Students currently living in Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA)

    The Government decided that private PBSA that had signed up to the government-approved codes of practice (The ANUK/Unipol Code) should be removed from the effects of the Act by changing ‘specified educational institutions’ to ‘specified institutions’ under provisions to be found in the 1988 Housing Act. This technical change means that PBSA providers will become specified institutions (as most educational institutions already are) and their tenancies will be common law tenancies, and this means that fixed-term tenancies can continue in those properties.

    But existing contracts in private sector PBSA will go through a ‘transitional period’ because only tenancies granted after specified status has been granted will be common law tenancies.

    As the Government explained:

    To apply the exemption retrospectively would carry significant risk, as it would turn one of these existing PBSA tenancies into what is known as a ‘common law’ tenancy: that is, a tenancy almost entirely regulated by what is in the tenancy agreement. This could cause unintended consequences, such as those PBSA tenancies containing significantly fewer rights for tenants than the assured shorthold tenancies they will have signed… We do not consider it to be the right approach, therefore, to simply exempt pre-existing PBSA tenancies from assured tenancy status.

    So existing AST tenancies in PBSA will fall under the assured tenancy status. After specified status has been granted (which will be from the date of tenure implementation) then future tenancies will be common law tenancies.

    The Government made some special concessions to minimise these ‘transitional effects’. This means the property will not have to be an HMO to use ground 4a repossession, and the July to September time frame 4a will not apply.

    PBSA providers will still be able to use S21 notices (as detailed previously) before implementation, and after that they will be able to use new ground 4a on all PBSA properties. This is likely to be useful because tenancies ending in September (mainly relating to studios) will allow sufficient time to give those tenants 4 months’ notice under the new Act.

    There will still be a moment of anxiety if a student who is not issued with a S21 notice decides simply to stay, although they could be given 4 months’ notice under new ground 4a at any stage after implementation. This risk is, however, much lower for PBSA where it is likely, if any inconvenience occurred for incoming tenants because of a ‘stayer’, that alternative accommodation may be available to be provided within the same building or in a nearby building, so the risk to the provider will be mitigated.

    Students signing up to live in Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) in the future

    At present, students will continue to be signed up on ASTs because that is the current system.

    As mentioned previously, any new tenancy will have its status determined by when a tenant ‘takes possession’ and can move in (which is when the tenancy is actually granted). If the moving-in date occurs after the PBSA manager / supplier has specified status, then tenants will have a common law tenancy. This common law tenancy means that the terms of the letting are those outlined in the tenancy agreement between the tenant and the landlord, and these will fall outside of the tenure provisions of the Act, which applies primarily to assured tenancies. A common law tenancy allows for fixed-term tenancies where repossession can be granted on the contractual terms outlined in the tenancy agreement, and rent payment periods will be as detailed in the tenancy.

    Although tenants in PBSA will have fewer rights under the Act than other tenants, membership of the Approved Code will ensure deposit protection continues and that tenants can give 4 weeks’ notice if they fail to get their required grades and no longer need their accommodation, if they stop studying and leave the institution, or they withdraw because of illness. The Code complaints system has also been tightened and improved. So tenants renting from PBSA will still see an improvement in tenure flexibility.

    Most tenancies in PBSA for 2026/27 are likely to be common law tenancies because they will come into effect after specified status has been granted.

    Conclusion

    So long as implementation takes place around April to June 2026, the annual summer 2026 changeover should be relatively smooth. The use of S21 notices by landlords is likely to be widespread and should ensure most tenancies can be brought to an end. In the unlikely event that implementation is earlier than April, then the 4 months’ notice under new ground 4a can also be used.

    The danger area relates to off-street non-HMOs and how many of those students, or ex-students, will choose to stay, reducing that supply of housing to future students. The prediction is that, over a couple of letting cycles, much of this type of housing will join the mainstream housing rental stock and move outside of the timing of the academic cycle. Educational institutions and students’ unions would be wise to try to monitor that shift and any loss of this accommodation to determine its effect on admissions.

    One interesting provision, regarding the use of ground 4a is that, for future signings, it will not apply if students signed their contracts 6 months before they can move in. It will be interesting to see whether this has any impact on ‘early letting’ in the off-street market and whether this impacts current PBSA practices.

    What can educational institutions and their students’ unions do to assist in the smooth implementation of the Act?

    Anything to do with tenure is necessarily complex, but every effort should be made to explain to students what this change will mean for them. What information exists suggests that student awareness of the Act is very low, with StuRents reporting that 69% of students said they had never heard of the Renters Rights Bill, and only 15% saying they understood how it could affect them. A recent study by Unipol also reported that 62% of students had not heard of the Bill.

    There will be real and immediate advantages for student renters who will be on assured tenancies, such as the ability to give two months’ notice and, perhaps the biggest gain of all for hard-up students, only needing to pay rent four weeks in advance. In the longer term, they will also have minimum standards set under the Decent Homes Standard and will have a right of redress through an ombudsman.

    Of course, some may temper these immediate advantages by predicting that the Act will see a reduction in student housing supply resulting in rent rises, an increase in the use of guarantors with rising deposit levels (to counter-act the risk of shorter rent payment periods) and that most shared student houses (HMOs) already fall under licencing which should already ensure that the property is safe and being kept in good order.

    The reality is that no one knows how the Act will affect the market and students specifically. With that in mind, it will be important for institutions to try to monitor how the Act affects their students in their local property market.

    In PBSA, the Act will have less effect, but this also comes at a time of rapid change in that market, with issues such as a slow-down in development; the challenges of keeping ageing stock up to standard; the growth of commuter students; greater regulation post-Grenfell with the Building Safety Regulator; and problems associated with higher rent levels and affordability.

    These market and legislative changes will mean that both housing suppliers and students are likely to see a significant transformation of student housing over the next couple of years. It is important that advice about housing rights and supply reflects those changes and assumptions that ‘things will continue as before’ are set aside.

    Previous HEPI publications dealing with this issue are:

    Renters (Reform) Bill and the impact on higher education 24 May 2023 by Rose Stephenson https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/05/24/renters-reform-bill-and-the-impact-on-higher-education/

    How the Renters (Reform) Bill can deliver for all tenants – including students 13 November 2023 by Calum MacInnes https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/11/13/how-the-renters-reform-bill-can-deliver-for-all-tenants-including-students/

    Students and the Renters (Reform) Bill: the government has listened but it needs to listen some more parts I and II run across 29 and 30 January 2024 by Martin Blakey https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2024/01/29/students-and-the-renters-reform-bill-the-government-has-listened-but-it-needs-to-listen-some-more-part-i/ and https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2024/01/30/students-and-the-renters-reform-bill-the-government-has-listened-but-it-needs-to-listen-some-more-part-ii/

    The Renters Reform Bill: after the fall – Where should student housing go from here? 19 June 2024 by Martin Blakey https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2024/06/19/the-renters-reform-bill-after-the-fall-where-should-student-housing-go-from-here

    Renters’ Rights Bill and Student Accommodation: The Final Stretch? 9 October 2024 by Martin Blakey https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2024/10/09/renters-rights-act-and-student-accommodation-the-final-stretch/

    Renters’ Rights Bill Update – into the Lords 2 February 2025 by Martin Blakey https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2025/02/03/renters-rights-bill-update-into-the-lords/

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